Is Link Exchange Dead?

One of the most easy backlink building strategies ever been used is link exchange, as webmasters started to abuse on this and do link exchange with the only purpose to build better search engine rankings the search engines, and mainly Google search engine started to devalue such linking schemes.

Why Links from Link Exchange schemes is devalued

The main reason why it was devalued is because of exchanging links with irrelevant sites and with the only purpose to trick search engines algorithm and gain higher ranking in the SERPs. Now that we do know that a link is a vote to our site, this would make false voting, and as always false voting get devalued or wiped and in worst cases when who is competitive to count votes can’t determine which were fake votes and which true, the voting ends for you or rather, you get penalized.

Is Link Exchange really dead?

Just as any other linking scheme when done wrong it goes bye bye for you, this does not mean that doing link exchange is absolutely a NO answer. I would not see as bad practice to link with another site that shares informations that are related to my informations and vice versa, in a scheme like our link becomes as bridge of informations which users can combine to get their answer. But if me and another site which has nothing to do with SEO or Internet marketing exchange links there is not going to be any benefit for the users in terms of informations as we treat totally different topic in our blogs, and the link will most likely be devalued from search engines.

Speaking about link exchange where the links of two sites become a bridge to informations for our readers, Aaron Wall has a great post on link bait being considered as reciprocal linking, where the bloggers that share similar topics and interlink with each others articles with the only purpose to share or explain better a information get considered as link exchange, which makes sense to a certain point.

Should I do Link Exchange?

If thats the question you’d ask me, i’d have to answer you “who am I to tell”, but mainly because link exchange is up to your decision. What I would advice you is, if you intend of doing link exchange make sure you do it with sites that have a content related to the one you have but shares different type of informations and don’t make a excessive use of link exchange strategy (excessive I would consider anything above 15% of your total incoming links).

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